Quotes About Humanity

the hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with "compassion" written all over it.

And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats—Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling—the whole Germanic sphere—without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.

Of all the definitions of "human" provided over the ages—from the "political animal" to the "symbolic animal"—probably the most accurate is the "role-taking animal," the capacity to see not only what one is oneself seeing but to put oneself in the shoes of an other and see the world as that other is seeing it.

Boomeritis, 297–298 This, then, is the message of Jung; the message of Maslow, Assagioli, and the whole Fourth Force; and more, of the saints, sages, and mystics, whether Amerindian, Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian: at the bottom of your soul is the soul of humanity itself, but a divine, uncreate soul, leading from time to eternity, from death to immortality, from bondage to liberation, from enchantment to awakening.

I had my own test, better than Turing's: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide.

To put it all very plainly, evolution can continue. It has already brought forth humans from amoebas— why on earth should we think that after that prodigious feat lasting billions of years, evolution just petered out and wound down? And if the ratio amoeba to human is repeated, the result could only be God. The mystics simply show us the stages of higher evolution leading to that Summit.

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all.

Culture has very much to do with the human spirit. What we find beautiful or entertaining or moving is rooted in our spiritual life.

As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn't so difficult to recognize barbarism.

There is no border in my films. You can see yourself in these stories. This is the greatest thing about the power of cinema. It's very present. It's all there. You can't escape it.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

Never lose heart in the power of the gospel. Do not believe that there exists any man, much less any race of men, for whom the gospel is not fitted.

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

The effects of human rights education can be dramatic in awakening people to the value and power of their own lives, as shown in the following stories.

To slight a single human being, is to slight those divine powers and thus to harm not only that being but with him, the whole world.

Straying off course is not recognized as a capital crime by civilized nations.

Man's responsibility increases as that of the gods decreases.

Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.

Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.

The force of arms only reveals man s weakness.

We will be remembered not for the power of our weapons but for the power of our compassion, our dedication to human welfare.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

The more power that we have, the less human we are.

Far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.